Online Bullying Needs to Stop

Recently I’ve been the victim of online bullying from a former friend who is choosing Facebook as her medium to badmouth me at every chance she gets. Of course she is blocked, but sometimes it gets bad enough that I am told what she is saying and the slander is atrocious.

No one deserves this. No one.

It’s a terrible feeling to know someone is slandering you to other potential future friends or current friends but in this case it’s even worse when she is messaging others when she sees my photo appear with mutual friends in her newsfeed. She is bullying me and she is bullying them. She is making up stories so that I am seen as the worst person in the world and she has more time than I do to thrive on such energy. It’s a sad situation really.

I didn’t have Facebook growing up, but I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers going through the same thing. This 60 year old is behaving exactly like a 12 year old would. “I can’t be friends with you because you are friends with her WAH WAH WAH” or “How can you stand to be her friend when she is such a terrible person?” The way these stories are going, I suspect she will blame me for climate change or the extinction of dinosaurs or the fungus growing on her big toe. You get the picture.

I’m old enough to realize that if someone doesn’t like me, or even hates me that I can live with that. I do not live to be admired and quite frankly anyone who has the capacity for such horrible behavior isn’t going to be part of my friends list.

It’s been over a year since I last talked to this person. Yet she continues to the point that some people believe the lies she is spewing forth or embellishing for her own benefit.

At a recent gathering in which I was with our mutual friends (she wasn’t there) I was actually physically sick thinking about the nasty comments she was going to make whenever she saw my photo appear with her friends. I am a motherly type and I feel it is my duty to stand up for my friends if they are being wronged.

There is no solution to this. Just sadness. Until she finds her next person to hate more than others.